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Russian speakers in Ukraine are part of the "Russian World", according to Vladimir Putin's divisive attempts to legitimize Russian intervention there. But given that every third Ukrainian speaks Russian, what is the real significance of language in everyday life in Ukraine?
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Cem Deveci, writing in Varlik, argues that modernity has replaced a hierarchical value-system with multiple norms, which one may prioritize as one likes. Now, questions such as whether a technologically advanced state is necessarily a democratic one, whether industrial progress does more harm than good, and whether limitless consumption is a travesty of freedom, are casting doubt over modernity's promises.

In Turkey, people are reaching for "super norms" that provide orientation in an era of uncertainty. This desire produces two attitudes: religiosity and nationalism. "A return to religion and pride in one's identity are, in general, considered normal." Yet to be modern, writes Devici, "necessitates a struggle to uphold those human and secular norms we wish to be valid. Nihilistic attitudes serve those who perceive normality as a means of repression."

Eurozine Review

Every two weeks, the Eurozine Review rounds up current issues published by the journals in the Eurozine network. This is just a selection of the more than 80 Eurozine partners published in 34 countries. All Eurozine Reviews

Literary perspectives: In a series initiated by Eurozine, renowned critics and authors review the literary landscapes of their respective countries, thereby bringing varying critical traditions and practices to the attention of international readers. Kicking off the series in its own pages, Varlik translates Matt McGuire's excellent article on contemporary Northern Irish prose and poetry. While the Northern Irish literary tradition is closely bound up with the experience of sectarian violence, writes McGuire, contemporary poets and prose writers defy the assumption that "the troubles" are all there is to the country's literature.

Constructions of European identity are more often than not based on the contrast to the United States. Europe is different to the US: more humane, more just, more equal. Europeans watch Michel Moore's film Sicko and are horrified by the sight of American poverty. But at the same time, Europeans know very little about the dark sides of their own society. In a self-critical focus on the supposedly polar relationship between EU and the US, Swedish Arena asks if the European self-image stands the test of reality.

It turns out that cracks appear here and there in European self-indulgence. Per Wirtén touches an especially sore point: European poverty. "The EU machinery often declares that the fight against poverty has priority. But the responsibility for policy measures are still confined to national institutions and the ambition to see the whole is scattered in a geographic mosaic." Still, the figures are there, and they do not flatter Europe: every fourth Greek is in arrears with the most necessary bills (water, electricity, etc); 30 per cent of Estonians and almost as many Portuguese describe their housing as "slum-like"; 60 per cent of Romanians living under the poverty line have no access to an indoor toilet, 45 per cent of Lithuanians...

More on EU vs. USA: Ylva Bergman, editor of Ottar, a journal on sexual and reproductive rights, points to the obvious fact that abortion is a highly debated issue in the US. In the EU, however, it's a taboo question. Nobody seems to be prepared to take on the political fight against those countries that do not regard abortion as a human right.

Mats Wingborg takes a closer look at the anti-Semitic, homophobic, revisionist, and racist parties making their mark on European politics everywhere, including in the European parliament. These parties would be unthinkable in the US.

Europeans are outraged by the racism in the US but reproduce it at home, writes Lawen Mohtadi in an article about the "Rage against the Roma". In the EU you can still find segregated schools and dreams of ethnic cleansing. Roma are despised in every country in the Union.

Viktoria Radics writes on the cultural renaissance of Bosniak culture in Sarajevo, exemplified by the publication of a new dictionary of the Bosnian language – "one with broad-ranging and liberal views that does not prescribe or archaize". The courtyards of Sarajevo's mosques, now restored, are once again centres of social life and young Bosniak women – to the dismay of an older generation of urbanites – are donning the Mahram, or headscarf.

Nevertheless, the traditionally liberal, western oriented Islam of the Bosniaks has a competitor in the form of the "pure Islam" preached in mosques funded from Saudi Arabia: "The contemporary tendency to pan-Islamism is to a great extent re-Islamizing secular Bosnian national identity [...] and in doing so drawing strong criticism from the liberal Bosnian intelligentsia."

Outside Sarajevo, the picture is rather different. In Stolac, where Croatian troops systematically destroyed traditional Muslim buildings (Radic calls this "urbanicide", the architectural correlate to the genocide of Stolac's Muslims), the Catholic community did all it could after the war to prevent the central mosque being rebuilt. Outward displays of Catholic piety are a favoured camouflage for wartime guilt, a local historian explains:

"The crosses were set up by war criminals and their supporters in order to justify their sinful deeds. They hide behind the cross. They thereby mislead Catholics, making it seem that crime and hatred is necessary in the defence of Christianity, in order to ensure the survival of Christians. They thus make themselves and every Christian that honours the cross party to 'hate as self-defence'."

Laziness: Introducing a Hungarian-German dossier on "The architecture of the everyday. Habit, laziness, inspiration", the editors write: "Inactivity often conceals a silent resistance to the presumptions of usual life, to the intrusions of an ever more demanding economy. The topic of inactivity reflects the crisis of the concept of work: not only is there not enough work to go round, work also no longer guarantees emancipation, progress, and education. The burden of work thus returns to the fore, and with it, the desire to shed that burden."

"Bosnia's victims, 1991-1995: Total number of dead or missing: 97207". Le Monde diplomatique (Oslo) supplies this information in a neutral, grey box within Henrik Pryser Libell's article, "The graves of the blue butterflies". Following Amor Masovic, president of the Federal Commission of Missing Persons in Bosnia, in his untiring work to find and identify as many of the victims as possible, we are presented with the bleak facts of the work and the political and emotional conditions attached to it. But there is hope. Through trips organized by the Norwegian Helsingfors Committee, youth from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo visit sites where atrocities took place and meet rape victims and survivors of concentration camps, and genocide. Through coming to terms with the past, the aim is to move towards a unified future.

The failing immune system of the press: In a continuation of last issue's discussion of the gullibility of the Norwegian press (see the Eurozine Review 27.11.2007), Kim Bredesen asks just how vulnerable Norwegian media is to disinformation and manipulation. The overall consensus is that the press is overly receptive to psychological operations (PSYOP) and information war. The danger of this is that events are given undue importance in the media, which even serves to legitimize military operations – the military often being the unidentified source behind the information in the first place, writes Bredesen.

"No end in sight":Truls Lie, who visited the Danish documentary film festival CPH:DOX, asks; "can one via film really repossess reality and create justice?" He replies with a resounding "yes!", highlighting the film "No end in sight" by Charles Ferguson as a candidate. "Director Ferguson – with a doctorate in political science from American MIT – found no film about the "reconstruction" of Iraq and made his own. He went straight to the top level of US's own people in Iraq, and the interviews are revealing." The film is to be aired on NRK, Norwegian state television, in January 2008.

More film: Steffen Moestrup revisits Ivan's Childhood (1962) by Andrei Tarkovsky, and Arnstein Bjørkly discusses the revival of Romanian film with special focus on 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Cristian Mungius, which recently won the best film prize at the European Film Awards in Berlin.

Writing in Arche, Iryna Vidanava analyses recent demonstrations in Belarus from the youth perspective. She attributes a central role to "generation 2.0" in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Belarusian society. Unlike their parents' generation, with its "kitchen discussions", younger Belarusians exchange ideas anonymously online. Statistics from NOVAK and Gallup complete Vidanava's image of a generation "possessed by hope".

Alaksandar Chubryk attempts to solve the "Belarusian riddle": Why, despite intense speculation about an economic collapse following Moscow's energy price hike, does Belarus's economy continue to grow? Among the reasons for the "miracle", Chubryk points out Belarus's customs union with Russia, a rise in the value of oil and other raw materials exported from Belarus, and the continuing gas subsidy from Russia.

Dzianis Mieljancou asks: "Will Belarus be admitted to GUAM?" (the alliance between Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova is seen as a counterweight to Russian influence in the region). The Russian-Georgian controversy and the sensational meeting between Lukashenko and Georgian Foreign Minister suggest as much. Mieljancou's conclusions are based on the threats and advantages of Belarus's membership in the regional association – all linked to energy policy and geopolitical developments following the parliamentary elections in Russia.

Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, explanations still need to be sought for why a regime that protected its borders with maximum security fences, barbed wire, and mines was widely accepted by intellectuals in the West. In "Cracks in the wall", Detlev Schöttker writes that "The dissemination of the cultural output of the GDR in the West especially through films, the humanities, and literature, contributed to the acceptability of the dictatorship and continued even when despotism was directed against representatives of culture themselves."

Early films produced by DEFA (the East German studios), were, due to their Nazi-period subject matter, already directed at both Germanys; the international success of Jakob der Lügner (1974) along with the presence of East German actors in Western productions reinforced the sense of a unified Germany avant la lettre. In the humanities, West German university libraries subscribed to East German journals, while Western journals in the 1970s and early 1980s debated topics imported from the East: theories of fascism, capitalism, working-class culture, and so on.

Literature featured most prominently in the cultural transfer. The more novelist and songwriter Wolf Biermann attacked the GDR regime, the better he served it as an alibi for political tolerance. Biermann's flight from the GDR in 1976 sharpened attention on the political status of literature in East Germany and East German émigré writers began provoking colleagues who had remained behind to support socialism. Meanwhile, Ulrich Plenzdorf's novel Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1973), and later stage versions of it, set the tone for later East German rock music, whose expression of longing for individual freedom resonated broadly in the West.

Also to look out for: "Zoo-philosopher" Wolfgang Wieser argues that biological arguments will increasingly replace, or at least complement, psychoanalytical discussions on the nature of the human mind; and art historian Wolfgang Kempdiscusses layman's publishing in the era of the blog.

It's not every day that a politician makes it into the pages of a literary journal. The new issue of Brno-based Host prints Czech prime minister Mirek Topolánek's surprisingly eloquent speech delivered on the occasion of the award of the Czech State Prize for literature to Milan Kundera.

Dispirited by an ironic remark made by a prominent critic, "who, without omitting the author¹s juvenile verses praising Communism, completely left out The Joke [...] and stated that it would be better to completely abolish the State Prize for literature than give it to Kundera", Topolánek makes an equally ironic observation: "the fight against success obviously goes on".

American and anti-American literature: In an essay on Philip Roth's The plot against America – "When the inconceivable becomes real" – Michal Sykora praises Roth for insisting on the right to include his own ethical judgments in the text. In fact, Sykora's essay soon develops into an engaged defence of a literature that "guides readers in their value orientation and helps them to define their identity".

"Modernist experiments and postmodern puns offered such an orientation only in a very limited way; literature itself became the criterion. Very few modernist and postmodernist writers ­ such as Beckett or Nabokov ­ were able to say, in spite of the experimental character of their texts, something substantial about the world in which they lived. The end of literary postmodernism came (let¹s afford an overstatement) at the moment when writers again felt the need for stories with a meaning."

In 1607, Monteverdi's musical theatre piece L'Orfeo was performed for the first time at the Gonganza court in Mantua. Though Jacopy Peri had written his Dafne ten years earlier, the Mantua premiere was the birth of a genre. Celebrating 400 years of opera, Tallinn-based Vikerkaar devotes a double issue to what art historian Kenneth Clark has called "one of the strangest inventions of Western man".

The first Estonian opera, Vikerlased (Vikings), was staged in 1928. Poet and librettist Maarja Kangro looks at how the Estonian opera libretto has developed since then. The naive nationalist clichés of the 1920s and 1930s soon gave way to its communist counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s. In the following decades, there was room for more serious literary ambitions, but sometime in the 1980s the tragic grand opera exhausted itself. The contemporary revival of Estonian opera has instead taken on two contrasting minor forms, writes Kangro: the grotesque and the contemplative.

More on opera: Mardi Valgemäe surveys the history of opera in architecture and points to the opera houses in six European cities – Florence, Parma, Venice, Prague, Paris, and Bayreuth – as important signposts in the development of the genre. And Jaan Ross compares Bizet's Carmen with the story on which Bizet modelled his piece, a novella by Prosper Mérimée.

This is just a selection of the more than 60 Eurozine partners published in 34 countries. For current tables of contents, self-descriptions, and subscription and contact details of all Eurozine partners, please see the partner section.

Published 2007-12-11

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, questions of inequality and solidarity have become intertwined. Over the past year, however, questions of solidarity have also been central in connection to the treatment of refugees and migrants. [more]

In the two decades after the end of the Cold War, intellectual interaction between Russia and Europe has intensified. It has not, however, prompted a common conversation. The focal point "Russia in global dialogue" seeks to fuel debate on democracy, society and the legacy of empire. [more]

Post-revolutionary Ukrainian society displays a unique mix of hope, enthusiasm, social creativity, collective trauma of war, radicalism and disillusionment. Two years after the country's uprising, the focal point "Ukraine in European dialogue" takes stock. [more]

Across Europe, citizens are engaging in new forms of cultural cooperation while developing alternative and participatory democratic practices. The commons is where cultural and social activists meet a broader public to create new ways of living together. [more]

To coincide with the awarding of the 2016 Jean Améry Prize for European essay writing, Eurozine publishes essays by authors nominated for the prize, including by a representative selection of Eurozine partner journals. [more]

The Snowden leaks and the ensuing NSA scandal made the whole world debate privacy and data protection. Now the discussion has entered a new phase - and it's all about policy. A focal point on the politics of privacy: claiming a European value. [more]

The fate of migrants attempting to enter Fortress Europe has triggered a new European debate on laws, borders and human rights. A focal point featuring reportage alongside articles on policy and memory. With contributions by Fabrizio Gatti, Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Leogrande. [more]

At a time when the global pull of democracy has never been stronger, the crisis of democracy has become acute. Eurozine has collected articles that make the problems of democracy so tangible that one starts to wonder if it has a future at all, as well as those that return to the very basis of the principle of democracy. [more]

Brought on by the global economic recession, the eurocrisis has been exacerbated by serious faults built into the monetary union. Contributors discuss whether the EU is not only broke, but also broken -- and if so, whether Europe's leaders are up to the task of fixing it. [more]

In recent years, Hungary has been a constant concern for anyone interested in European politics. We have collected articles published in Eurozine on recent developments in Hungary and broader issues relating to Hungarian politics, history and culture. [more]

The public sphere is not something given; it is made - over and over again. But which actors are involved and what roles do they play? Is there a difference between an intellectual and an expert? And in which media or public space does the debate take place? [more]

Harbour cities develop distinct modes of being that not only reflect different cultural traditions and political and social self-conceptions, but also contain economic potential and communicate how they see themselves as part of the larger structure that is "Europe". [more]

Broadening the question of a common European narrative beyond the East-West divide. How are contested interpretations of historical and recent events activated in the present, uniting and dividing European societies? [more]

Media change is about more than just the "newspaper crisis" and the iPad: property law, privacy, free speech and the functioning of the public sphere are all affected. On a field experiencing profound and constant transformation. [more]

Despite the Internet's growing significance as vehicle of freedom of expression, public service broadcasting and the press will remain for some time the visible face of the watchdog on power. In western Europe, the traditional media need to prove they are still capable of performing this role. [more]

Eurozine emerged from an informal network dating back to 1983. Since then, European cultural magazines have met annually in European cities to exchange ideas and experiences. Around 100 journals from almost every European country are now regularly involved in these meetings.

The Eurozine conference 2016 in Gdańsk will frame the general topic of
solidarity with a focus on mobilizing for the commons. The conference will take place in the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk thus linking contemporary debates to the history of a broad, non-violent, anti-communist social movement which has started in the city's shipyard in 1980. [more]

Under the heading "Making a difference. Opinion, debate and activism in the public sphere", the 2013 Eurozine conference in Oslo focused on cultural and intellectual debate and the production of the public sphere. [more]

Harbour cities as places of movement, of immigration and emigration, inclusion and exclusion, develop distinct modes of being that communicate how they see themselves as part of the structure that is "Europe". The 2012 Eurozine conference explored how European societies deal variously with the cultural legacy of the "harbour city".[ more ]

The Eurozine conference on "Changing Media - Media in Change" from 13-16 May 2011 brought fresh insights to debates on the future of journalism, intellectual property and free speech, and made one thing very clear: independent cultural journals are where reflexion and criticality combine with changing media strategies.[ more ]

How do migration and institutional mistrust relate to one another? As a new wave of populism feeds on and promotes fears of migration, aggrandising itself through the distrust it sows, The Red House hosts a timely debate with a view to untangling the key issues. [more]

This summer, Time to Talk partner Free Word, London hosted a debate on the role that literature houses play in preserving freedom of expression both in Europe and globally. Should everyone get a place on the podium? Also those representing the political extremes? [more]

On 10 April, De Balie and the ECF jointly organized a public debate in Amsterdam entitled "In the EU we (mis)trust: On the road to the EU elections". Some of the questions raised: Which challenges does Europe face today? Which strategic choices need to be made? [more]

What do young Brits think about state surveillance, privacy and the choices we all make about sharing our personal data online? Is privacy achievable in lives lived so much online and what measures can, and do, we undertake to protect our information? [more]

Depo looks at Turkey's security politics, taking in their origin, consolidation and present development: how much do people trust their institutions and what impact do these levels of trust have upon how confident people in Turkey feel in their everyday lives? [more]

Decades after first encountering Anglo-Saxon perspectives on democracy in occupied postwar Germany, Jürgen Habermas still stands by his commitment to a critical social theory that advances the cause of human emancipation. This follows a lifetime of philosophical dialogue. [more]

The history of Ukraine has revealed the turning points in the history of Europe. Prior to Ukraine's presidential elections in May 2014, Timothy Snyder argued cogently as to why Ukraine has no future without Europe; and why Europe too has no future without Ukraine. [more]

As the culture and institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way. The aim being to expand autonomy and solidarity at the same time. [more]

Earlier civil disobedients hinted at our increasingly global condition. Snowden takes it as a given. But, writes William E. Scheuerman, in lieu of an independent global legal system in which Snowden could defend his legal claims, the Obama administration should treat him with clemency. [more]

Freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment. Yet, only with the planetary crisis of climate change is an awareness now emerging of the geological agency human beings gained through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. [more]

Commemorative causality, the confusion between present resonance and past power, denies history its proper subject, writes Timothy Snyder. What is easiest to represent becomes what it is easiest to argue and, in lieu of serious explanations, only emotional reflexes remain. [more]

Social segregation, cultural appropriation: the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, as recorded in literature and art, represents the underside of the European subject's self-invention as agent of civilizing progress in the world, writes Klaus-Michael Bogdal. [more]

To write is to write one's way through the preconceived and into the world on the other side, to see the world as children can, as fantastic or terrifying, but always rich and wide-open. Karl Ove Knausgård on creating literature. [more]

Jonathan Bousfield talks to three award-winning novelists who spent their formative years in a Central Europe that Milan Kundera once described as the kidnapped West. It transpires that small nations may still be the bearers of important truths. [more]

Our language is our literary destiny, writes Olga Tokarczuk. And "minority" languages provide a special kind of sanctuary too, inaccessible to the rest of the world. But, there again, language is at its most powerful when it reaches beyond itself and starts to create an alternative world. [more]

The recent publication of the private diary of Witold Gombrowicz provides unparalleled insight into the life of one of Poland's great twentieth-century novelists and dramatists. But this is not literature. Instead: here he is, completely naked. [more]

He pointed a way for American fiction out of the doldrums of postmodernism, writes George Blecher. For a culture troubled by the corrosive commercial media and closed-end systems underpinned by technology, David Foster Wallace's influence remains a force to be reckoned with. [more]

It is high time to lift the aesthetic state of emergency that has surrounded witness literature for so long, writes Steve Sem-Sandberg. It is not important who writes, nor even what their motives are. What counts is the "literary efficiency". [more]

Nationalism in Belgium might be different from nationalism in Ukraine, but if we want to understand the current European crisis and how to overcome it we need to take both into account. The debate series "Europe talks to Europe" is an attempt to turn European intellectual debate into a two-way street. [more]

Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue funds: is there still a future for a common Europe? Therese Kaufmann, Ivan Krastev, Claus Offe, Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann, Martin M. Simecka diagnose causes for the current malaise of the EU. [more]

Perceived loss of sovereignty and rising hostility towards migrants are behind the nationalist revival in many EU member states. Yet in the countries of the former USSR, nationalism is associated with democratization. Andriy Shevchenko and David Van Reybrouck discuss whether talking about contemporary nationalism in East and West in the same terms is possible at all. [more]

The surge in "anti-politics" throughout Europe coincides with media marketization and the rise of digital technologies. Ivaylo Ditchev and Judith Vidal-Hall analyse media change and the loss of trust in political institutions. What happens to democracy when political decision-making relies increasingly on the opinion poll? [more]

Multiculturalism, the default strategy in western Europe for managing cultural diversity, is increasingly under attack from both Right and Left. If multiculturalism has reached its limits, what are the alternatives that can help manage diversity, both in the East and in the West? Kenan Malik and Fero Sebej in debate. [more]

While an historical-materialist approach to both culture and society has strong critical potential in western Europe, many eastern European intellectuals regard it sceptically. Jiri Pehe and Benedict Seymour ask whether Marxism - or even leftist politics - means one thing in the West and another in the East. [more]

The aggressive monetary policies of western financial institutions were a major factor for the crisis of eastern economies after the speculative bubble burst in 2008. Robert Misik and Daniel Daianu debate the ethical and political implications of western investment in eastern Europe and the globalized economy as a whole. [more]

In many European countries, a nationally framed approach to history clashes with those of neighbouring states. Danuta Glondys and Arne Ruth discuss the role of intellectuals in disputes over contested history and ask whether cross-border journalism can build an element of real universality into the European project. [more]

Martin M. Simecka and Laszlo Rajk, both sons of well-known persecuted communists, discuss the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their fathers' generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today's debate about the past in the former communist countries. [more]